Citadel’s Scott Rubner offers an analysis of the current equity market and what might play out in the near future in a note from October 14th. Rubner reports that consensus is expecting high earnings growth for Q3 (being reported now), about 27% year over year, “the third-highest expectation heading into a reporting season since 2010, behind only the two pandemic-recovery quarters.”

But this earnings growth is not evenly distributed. Nvidia and Micron account for more than a third of expected earnings growth, and the ten largest contributors represent about two-thirds of the expected growth. Nvidia saw growth of 581%, 145%, and 65% in fiscal years 2024, 2025, and 2026. Micron’s net income in fiscal year 2024 grew 113% and then 998% in fiscal year 2025. In fiscal year 2026, ending in September of this year, net income grew another 895%, on a base of $8.5 billion. That is incredible. But it’s likely also unsustainable!

While the dotcom boom is known for companies with no earnings achieving lofty stock market valuations, in fact, during that time frame many companies saw incredible earnings growth. From 1998 to 2000, earnings for the technology sector (based on a constant sample of 523 publicly traded tech companies), grew 38% annually.

What’s different today is that the earnings growth is being driven by the highly cyclical semiconductor industry. The world has never seen a boom like this in world semiconductor sales.

Rubner’s conclusions:

Our constructive Q4 view remains intact, with several of the dynamics highlighted in our last note beginning to materialize.

• Earnings: Expectations remain exceptionally strong, with forward earnings estimates rising even as valuations have compressed. Nearly half of the S&P 500 will report in five sessions, while corporate buyback windows begin reopening against a record year of authorizations.
• Rotation: Equal weight has begun to recover from historically depressed relative levels, with improving participation across defensives, cyclicals and rate-sensitive sectors. The recovery in market breadth is an encouraging development after months of narrow leadership.
• Retail: Buying has accelerated sharply, driven by stronger directional conviction rather than higher volumes. Demand remains concentrated in index ETFs, Semiconductors and AI infrastructure, alongside record-paced buying of fixed-income ETFs.
• Volatility: Single-stock volatility continues to outperform the index as correlations remain near historical lows. Earnings could reinforce that divergence, while low index implied volatility offers relatively attractive protection against a shift toward correlated selling.

We continue to favor selective single-stock exposure over simply adding index beta. The recent improvement in participation is promising, but the next several weeks will provide a much more meaningful test of whether it can persist.

While right now it may be useful to focus on single stocks, one might be careful not to overload on something like Micron or Nvidia, which are the beneficiaries of the AI buildout but which still represent a typically cyclical industry that has always in the past seen booms followed by incredible busts.

In Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side, Howard Marks writes:

[The] superior investor strikes an appropriate balance between fear (which is shorthand for risk aversion, dislike for loss, and respect for uncertainty and randomness) and greed (a.k.a. aspiration, aggressiveness and acquisitiveness). All people feel emotions, but the superior investor keeps these conflicting elements in balance. The presence of the two offsetting forces leads to responsible, wise and even-keeled behavior.

And later he continues with these points:

• Few people are always even-keeled and unemotional.
• For this reason, few investors are capable of staking out a midpoint position that balances greed and fear—and staying there—as more- and less-positive developments arise.
• To the contrary, most investors swing between being greedy when they’re optimistic and fearful when they’re pessimistic.
• Most swing to those positions at the wrong time—becoming greedier after the emergence of positive developments has caused prices to become elevated, and becoming more fearful after negative events have caused prices to become depressed.

The pendulum of individual, or market, sentiment is always swinging, Marks writes; it is “usually swinging toward one extreme or the other, first recovering from one psychological extreme—either too high or too low—and then continuing toward the other.”

Marks says he’s often asked “whether people can learn to be unemotional.” While he thinks people can watch out for emotional influences and work to limit their reactivity, he thinks “people who are inherently unemotional will have it easier. A lack of emotionality is a gift (in investing, that is, but perhaps not in other areas, like marriage).”

From an investor note he shared in January 2016, and quotes in the book:

One of the most significant factors keeping investors from reaching appropriate conclusions is their tendency to assess the world with emotionalism rather than objectivity. Their failings take two primary forms: selective perception and skewed interpretations. In other words, sometimes they take note of only positive events and ignore the negative ones, and sometimes the opposite is true. And sometimes they view events in a positive light, and sometimes it’s negative. But rarely are their perceptions and interpretations balanced and neutral.

Then he shares a cartoon he’s saved, calling it his favorite:

I’m finishing this blog post on Wednesday, not Tuesday of this week, and the cartoon applies. Yesterday the market was sad, and last Friday some people were asking, “is the AI trade over?” Today we’re in the green again after SpaceX reported an earnings beat, and less capex than expected.

The pendulum is always swinging!

Being human, we are our own worst enemy. Everything that goes on in the world and the market conspires to make people buy when things are going well and prices are high and sell when things are going badly and prices are low, and fighting that is the number one theme of… success.

Investor Howard Marks, interviewed by Tim Ferriss

“Emotion is one of the investor’s greatest enemies.” — Howard Marks

“Almost all the great investors I know are unemotional. Unemotionalism is one of the most important criteria for being a successful investor.” — Howard Marks

In my trading, I feel overly happy when I see green and overly sad when I see red. Friday’s continued decline in tech stocks had me feeling very, very sad, and agitated over the weekend.

More important, I attach too much emotion to my past successes and failures, ones from long ago, and ones that played out over years.

Perhaps the greatest skill I might develop through options trading and through my retirement portfolio management is to detach from my emotions — not to eliminate them, but to allow them to come and go, like the weather.

I want to execute on my trading plans not out of emotion, but based on systematic rules. I want to wake up to a bad down day like Friday and say to myself, who knows what’s good or bad?

A Tarot card for trading equanimity

I drew the Two of Swords card over the weekend in a reading around trading. I was feeling emotionally bad after Friday’s down day in the markets, especially as I had overloaded on tech in an episode of revenge trading.

Some Tarot interpreters read the Two of Swords card negatively, as confusion in making difficult choices, as indifference or detachment, as avoidance.

In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack describes this card as one of setting up an emotional fence:

One method of handling problems or opposition is to push everything away beyond an emotional fence. If we let nothing approach us, then nothing can hurt us. In contrast to the Eight, the blindfold here shows not confusion, but a deliberate closing of the eyes. The figure has tied it on herself so that she will not have to choose between friend and enemy, for such choice becomes the first step in once again involving herself with other people. The swords remain ready to strike anyone who tries to come close. They represent anger and fear creating a precarious balance; the one wants to strike out, the other wants to hide, and so the person remains tensed between them.

In relationships, people are expected to be emotionally open; this is what Pollack seems to encourage (and does as she continues her interpretation of the card). But being open emotionally is not always helpful. Maybe it’s not helpful to be open in a relationship where the other person wants to harm you, for example.

In the context of trading, this card starts to look like something positive. I read her blindfold as reminding her she cannot predict the future. She doesn’t know whether the stock market or any particular ticker is going to go up or down in the next days, weeks, months or years. The swords act to protect her from euphoric or despairing feelings being expressed by market participants. But her slightly open legs and feet pointed outwards suggest an openness to what might come.

The moon above her channels intuition. The rippling water behind her suggests movement but not crashing waves or a storm. Her white gown is serviceable and practical, not luxurious but also not too spare.

This is the card I have leaning against my monitor as I move into the trading week.

I’m cursing myself for some of the trades I placed over the last two weeks, making decisions counter to my own guidelines, and enacting a kind of revenge trading. I’m nervous that tomorrow is going to continue Friday’s sharp declines in tech stocks.

Tomorrow is October 19th, which recalls Black Monday, that day in 1987 on which there was a global stock market crash. The S&P 500 fell more than 20% that day, after having already fallen 9% the week before.

One of the major amplifiers of the crash was portfolio insurance, computer-driven strategies intended to limit losses used by institutions. These programs caused a feedback loop where prices fell, portfolio-insurance strategies called for more selling, which led to even more selling.

U.S. stock markets now have circuit breakers that pause trading in certain circumstances. These are based on S&P 500 declines:

• 7% decline – trading pauses for 15 minutes
• 13% decline – trading pauses for another 15 minutes
• 20% – trading stops for the rest of the day

The first two limits apply only before 3:25 pm Eastern, and halt trading across U.S. stock markets, not just S&P 500 stocks. The 20% shutdown applies anytime during the regular trading session.

These, of course, don’t stop losses from continuing after the pause or day’s halt is lifted. But they allow markets to absorb information and order. No floor is established under prices.

On Twitter, some pundits have been asking if we’re going to see another Black Monday tomorrow.

Even if we do, with the “buy the dip” mentality of current investors as well as the current presidential administration’s wish to keep stock market investors happy into the midterms, it seems like any such crash would be short-lived.

But I may be just fooling myself, looking for arguments for why we’re not going to see a whole lot more stock market weakness.

Overall liquidity in the economy is down, with the first rate hike and expectations of more tightening conditions, a coming end to tariff refund checks, and drag from delayed OBBB spending cuts that begin in 2027.

If the administration does want to do something to boost stock market prices, they are rapidly running out of options.

I’ll just have to wait and see what happens, tomorrow, and in the weeks and months after.

Other activities this week

This week, I’m working on improving my systems and practices for trading so as to avoid impulsive moves like I made over the past two weeks that left me in overly risky positions. I want to encode certain screening rules for trades, and build those rules into my trading app.

Beyond that, and aside from lunch with a friend on Thursday and taking my mom to the airport on Friday, my time is all my own, so I’ll be doing the usual: dog walking, lap swimming, trading, writing, home cleaning, and garden maintenance. I had my sprinklers blown out last week, and already brought my geraniums inside for the winter. I might need to do some hand watering of the garden beds and the lawn depending on this week’s weather, and it’s time to mow the lawn again.

Tonight is “Sunday Scaries,” in which my daughter and I alternately choose a horror movie, and eat pizza while we watch. It’s my turn to choose, so I’m perusing options from this Reddit thread, asking for “underrated or lesser-known horror films.”

Some options – The Mist, Audition, Bring Her Back, Antichrist, Speak No Evil. Antichrist is part of Lars Von Trier’s Depression Trilogy. I’ve seen the second in the trilogy Melancholia, so it might be interesting to watch that. But I didn’t love that movie, so I’m leaning more towards The Mist or Audition.

Have a great week!

Thinking about the Nietzschean idea, as formulated by Katsafanas, that consciousness gives a selective, partial, and falsifying view of unconscious states. Consciousness, to Nietzsche (according to Katsafanas), is what has been conceptualized, while the unconscious remains unconceptualized.

My options wheeling feels like it has gotten a little out of control lately — and is driven by my unconscious more than my consciousness — as I fail to follow guidelines I set up for myself. I’ve been engaging in what some traders call “revenge trading.” That’s when things go against you and you try to make them up, often through trading you otherwise wouldn’t do.

The options trading I do is not entirely mechanized and rules-based. I have a lot of discretion in terms of selecting which tickers to sell puts on, at what delta (the probability the option will end in-the-money and will result in my buying of shares), and with what expiration and strike (which determine the delta, among other so-called greeks). After I’m in the position, my guidelines don’t give much flexibility. I just manage the campaign according to pretty strict rules from there.

I have set guidelines for myself around diversification and maximum risk per trade. But they mainly applied when I was wheeling ETFs for a time and I’ve lately gotten back into single ticker short puts.

My guidelines haven’t kept up with my trading. And that’s happening at a dangerous time in the markets.

My nonconceptual unconscious has seemed to be largely in charge lately. The feelings and worries I have after a poor September (one in which my P&L was flat to lightly negative, not significantly negative) after a really good August are in charge of my trading. That’s not good. That’s not the trader I want to be.

I go from unnamed feelings to ideas about trades to putting on a new campaign without stepping back to see if it makes sense. Or if it follows even my most general rules (which need more elaboration, clearly).

Meanwhile, I’ve been gaining weight. I weigh myself every morning because if I don’t keep watch I can easily gain 10 or 15 pounds without noticing until suddenly my favorite leggings feel tight around my middle.

I haven’t been following my eating guidelines, which call for two meals a day, generally low carb, and only eating in the window 9 am to 3 pm, otherwise fasting (resulting in an 18-hour fast). Again, it’s my unconscious in charge. I go from feeling hungry to grabbing a snack without any conceptualization or consciousness in between.

It’s my sense that if I can bring my feelings, whether about my money or about my hunger and energy levels, more into consciousness — if I can conceptualize them better — then I will be able to better explicitly follow rules I’ve set out for myself.

But I also need to come up with rules that work for me, whether that be for trading or eating. In both domains, I have a good start at guidelines and rules, and when I actually take the time to follow them, they work well for me. But I probably need to do more to bring them “top of mind” (make them conscious?) so that I don’t act unconsciously in ways that don’t serve me.

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that there would come a time, possibly a century after that (i.e., about now), when capitalism would provide for all our needs and the work week would decrease from the then-standard 50-hour work week to something more like 15 hours a week.

That hasn’t happened. While wealth has increased as Keynes predicted, the average work week for a full-timer is 40 hours.

In a speech given at the Bruno Kreisky Forum in October of 2013, Robert Skidelsky shared ideas from the book How Much is Enough? that he wrote with his son Edward.

In the book, the father-son duo asked “why do we work the hours we do?” and came up with six possible answers:

1. The joys of work – but the majority of workers show “pervasive job dissatisfaction, distrust, and disengagement.”
2. Fear of idleness – that people wouldn’t know what to do if they didn’t have work organizing their lives.
3. The appeal of novelty, especially the array of consumer goods such as “the unfolding sequence of iPads” we are offered.
4. The social construction of wants, where people determine what they desire based on what other people have.
5. Rising income inequality where the actual wealth goes to a very small proportion of people, leaving many living in poverty or close to it.
6. That earnings, hours, and conditions of work are created by the “business class” not by the individuals who must seek work to fund their lives.

Today, thirteen years after that talk that Skidelsky gave, there are at least two more important financial reasons why someone would not work less than full-time, if they didn’t already have established funds to live on:

7. In the United States, health care and health insurance looms as the most expensive and difficult-to-obtain element of an individual or family’s budget. For the most part, only full-time jobs offer health insurance benefits and even those can be extremely expensive. Health insurance plans increasingly have not just outrageously high premiums but also very large deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums. For most people, working a part-time job does not provide health care coverage that is acceptable.
8. Healthy people face having to fund a retirement that may last 30 or 40 years and that may require expensive memory care (along with expensive health care too). You can’t save a reasonable amount for retirement by working 15 hours a week.

I planned to write a blog post about what is enough? But instead where I came around to is the incredible expense of modern life, especially health care and health insurance as well as planning for a long-term retirement that may include expensive long-term care.

Why should we not expect health care and long-term care costs to come down? Baumol’s Cost Disease gives a partial explanation. This theory, developed by economists William Baumol and William Bowen in 1965, explains why prices rise in industries that experience little to no growth. In high-productivity sectors such as manufacturing or tech, automation and innovation allow workers to produce more goods per hour. Employers raise wages without increasing the final price of the product. Then workers in low-productivity, labor-intensive sectors (healthcare and education for example) demand higher wages to stay in it, otherwise they get pulled into the high-productivity sectors. The low-productivity sectors therefore must raise their prices.

That’s only one reason why healthcare and long-term care costs so much. Other reasons include the U.S. third-party payer system, where consumers are somewhat insulated from prices (less and less in an era of high-deductible plans), asymmetry of information (how much and what kind of healthcare do you need anyway? only the doctor knows), administrative bloat, and regulations that result in higher spending and costs (such as the MLR requirements in the ACA).

Regardless, we are not living in a world where productivity brought on my capitalism has made it feasible for the average U.S. adult to work only 15 hours a week. Keynes was wrong!

For the past couple weeks, I’ve had difficulty getting my “Friday Flash” blog post out. I didn’t have any epiphanies to share. The week before last I went back and wrote about free will, but last week I gave up and left the day unblogged. Friday Flash too easily blends into Saturday Reflections and Sunday Planning, then Monday Musings, and I really haven’t had topic guardrails at that point for four days.

This week I’m introducing a new Friday category for myself: Friday Frugality. “Frugal Friday” would sound better — and maybe I’ll use that instead — but all of my other categories start with the day, and I like to follow rules, even those I just made up myself.

I find that frugal is fun, whether I’m growing hollyhocks from seeds a neighbor gave me or making assemblage art out of extra items I find around my house or finding a barely used ivory-colored Columbia fleece hoodie for $4 at Goodwill (I have two of those now!)

This morning I had breakfast with my father, and he told me he’s shopping for a Mac Mini. He asked what I thought he might need as far as RAM and hard drive space goes.

I told him, “you know, for your needs [emailing, reading news online, managing the occasional photo] you could probably get the most minimal version and have plenty of memory and hard drive space.”

He said, “I’m not a minimalist though!” as though I had insulted him.

And he’s not. I don’t follow in his footsteps in that respect. He buys the best of everything for himself (and for his loved ones too). No frugality for him.

But I’m not just frugal; I’m also a hedonist. I love indulgences. So I immediately grabbed the book The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More by Adam Grubb and Annie Raser-Rowland when I saw it available as an ebook from the library.

I checked out the book’s website and was delighted to find that the authors’ other book is The Weed Forager’s Handbook. I love it. I can definitely see myself (maybe in a parallel universe) foraging for weeds.

From the intro to The Art of Frugal Hedonism:

The truly savvy hedonist avoids blunting her capacity for pleasure against a barrage of constant stimulation. He knows that the rewards of the journey frequently trump instant gratification. They shun that level of convenience and indulgence that insidiously erodes their mental and physical vigour. She makes non-monetised sources of pleasure her first port of call, so that she’s not trapped into shaping her life around earning. Far from being acts of martyrdom, such frugality-compatible behaviours can in fact be your best ticket to enjoying everything more on both the deeply fulfilling and sensually satisfying levels.

I will, of course, write more about frugality on Friday if, as I’m thinking, I introduce a new daily theme for Friday.

But I’m so excited about it, I’m writing about it already today, for Wednesday Wealth. I’ve realized, since I left full-time work, that I can spend a lot less money than I used to just because I have more time and energy to do things thriftily. For example:

• I fixed a rock chip in my windshield myself. Safelite quoted me $120 to fix it (and it wouldn’t have been covered by my insurance, as I do have a deductible for that). The kit I used cost $14.
• I’ve grown a cottage garden almost entirely from seed instead using already-grown plants from a nursery.
• I eliminated my Dropbox subscription and moved all my stored and backed up files to a large external hard drive I already owned.
• When one of my sprinklers failed, I took two days to investigate and figure out how to fix it myself instead of texting my sprinkler guy to stop by.
• Every morning, if it’s cooler outside than inside, and I want it cooler inside, I run my attic fan with windows all over my house open. It’s much cheaper to get the house cool this way than to use air conditioning, and it makes the house fresher.
• I get all my books from the library — mostly ebooks because with my bad retina I can’t read printed books very well — and have plenty of time to research what I should be reading.

And I enjoy many cheap or free indulgences:

• Swimming at the Highlands Ranch lap pools — free because of the HOA fees I pay that cover rec center usage. The pleasures of an afternoon lap swim — water bubbling in my ears, an unhooking from financial news, feeling my shoulders even the sore one working again to propel me — are almost unparalleled (skiing is close, but not as cheap!) And every time I swim at the HRCA pool I do my showering there, saving water and water heating expenses.
• Blogging daily here. I look forward to getting up every morning and indulging in a time of reflection and communication, all for about $300 a year, or less than a dollar a day, to pay for WordPress.com which makes easy work of managing a personal website.
• Sunday Scaries with my daughter, who lives with me. Every Sunday, or sometimes Mondays if one or the other of us is busy Sunday, we alternate choosing a horror movie, bake frozen pizzas doctored up with cut up precooked meatballs and banana peppers, and join together in being completely frightened and totally released from our day to day cares. The movie usually costs $5 to stream (or less depending on which service) and we get two gluten-free frozen pizzas from Costco for $10 (cooking them both means leftovers for each of us). Meatballs add another couple dollars. That’s less than $20 for a weekly treat we look forward to and plan for all week.
• The daily dog walk. Each morning, my daughter and I meet in the front hall of my house and wrangle two super-excited dogs into their harnesses. We walk a mile. The dogs get their exercise, and their chance to potty, we get a chance to share our daily schedules and whatever’s on our minds. Cost: $0. Value: Priceless.

When I’ve had high paying jobs in the past, I would spend money because I could, and because it helped me feel better about the tedium and difficulty of my days. Now, spending money just doesn’t give me the same charge. Saving money, or spending money on only what gives me a lot of pleasure, is what makes me feel good.

I’ve recently finished Paula Hawkins’ novel The Blue Hour, a thriller about an artist, Vanessa Chapman, who lives mostly alone on a fictional Scottish tidal island which is only reachable via a causeway for 12 hours a day.

The novel opens with a question about Chapman’s assemblage work Division II, made of “Ceramic, urushi lacquer, gold leaf, gold filament, artiodactyl rib, wood, and glass.” The piece is described as:

One of just seven sculptures Chapman made combining ceramic pieces with found objects, Division II is a deceptively simple spatial device: a group of objects are arranged in relation to each other, suspended by wires, enclosed in a glass box.

Is that a deer rib, or is it human? an expert asks of the piece. And that launches the story of Chapman and her estranged husband Julian’s disappearance many years earlier.

I loved this book, although I found the ending less than satisfying. I thought the representation of what it was like to be an artist (but one very famous, unlike me) quite accurate.

When Vanessa completes Division (the first? or the one with the questionable rib? the book doesn’t say), she thinks to herself:

At least I do like the piece—everything else I have made recently has felt like a failure. So, progress! Next time, though, maybe I should try something on a larger scale? More complex? Something to consider. A new direction to explore! Creative work is such a ballast against despair. For the moment, I must be content with my own appraisal, with these green shoots. I know this will not be forever.

This made me wonder, is Hawkins herself an artist? Or has she translated her own experience of her emerging novelistic practice into the world of ceramic and assemblage art?

Probably the latter. Hawkins found success with her best-selling psychological thriller The Girl on the Train (2015), which was made into a film starring Emily Blunt in 2016. Hawkins started with romantic comedy fiction under the pen name Amy Silver in 2009, but didn’t see real commercial success until she turned to darker themes.

I found the representation of an artist’s life compelling and engaging, and I’ll be checking out Hawkins’ other books soon. I’ve already read The Girl on the Train, but apparently there are two other thrillers from Hawkins in between that book and The Blue Hour that feature a kind of narratological complexity I might enjoy: Into the Water and A Slow Fire Burning.

Surely you’ve heard of Marie Kondo, and her KonMari organizing and decluttering method. But have you heard of Hideko Yamashita’s Danshari philosophy?

Danshari brings together three concepts:

• Dan – to refuse unneeded things from entering your life
• Sha – to dispose of or discard things that no longer serve you
• Ri – to separate and detach yourself from the desire and emotional attachment to material things

From the description for Yamashita’s book Danshari: The Japanese Art of Decluttering Your Space to Transform Your Life:

At its heart, Danshari is about release. It’s about removing what no longer serves you emotionally as well as physically. Discarding clutter frees you from outdated beliefs and emotional burdens that are holding you back. The word Danshari literally means “reduce, release and relieve”—or, in other words, lightness, clarity and freedom.

With Danshari, instead of asking “where should this go?” or “does this object spark joy?” you ask “is this necessary for my life right now?”

I like this idea a lot, because when I’ve tried to declutter recently I’ve come up against emotional resistance. For example, I’ve been unable to give up my guitar and guitar music because it seems valuable to me, and it represents a person I once was. Could it help to begin eliminating things that are not necessary to my life right now, and eventually work my way around to emotionally heavy objects like the guitar?

And what about activities?

I am thinking of applying Danshari ideas to the activities I do. What is necessary right now? And what can I either refuse to let enter my life, or discard? More important, and more difficult, how to detach my identity from the activities and things of my life that no longer serve me?

In clinging to my guitar and guitar music, or to activities in my current life that are likely ready to pass out of it, I’m making my self too fixed. I’m making the idea of me and mine the active concept. Making things and activities mine and making their status as mine the most operative concept creates clinging and craving, and an unwillingness to watch experience (of things, of activities, of relationships) come and go.

Here’s where the Buddhist idea of not-self can help. This doesn’t mean there is no self. Instead, it means that by putting down the idea of a fixed and important self, you can reduce dukkha, that feeling of disharmony with your ever-evolving life.

In Being Somebody and Nobody Part 3 of 5: The Skillful Self, Ines Freedman says mindfulness shows us we have many selves, almost like a committee, with different members dominating depending on conditions: “maybe the controller, the perfectionist is at play, the pleaser, the critical parent, the judge, the fearful one, the playful child, the bratty child, the angry one, the smart one.”

She says of our internal committee members:

[One] of the great gifts of practice is that we begin to see them not as fixed identities, but as habit patterns…. conditioned ways that the mind organizes itself.

Turning towards life’s unfolding and away from fixed notions of the self and how your life should be, that makes you more open to what is happening at any given moment. Then, Freedman says, “confidence becomes less about self-image and more about just being available, available to life, to joy, to sorrow, to uncertainty.” You can be “equally at ease being nobody, going nowhere, or winning the Nobel Peace Prize.”

I’m going to share again the short poem from a thirteenth century Zen master that Freedman ends her talk with, because it is so beautiful and so appropriate to my musings today about letting go of what is no longer needed right now:

Spring has its hundred flowers, autumn its moon. Summer has its cooling breezes, winter its snow. If your mind is not clouded by pointless things, this is the best season of your life.

Today for Sunday Planning: planning for what to do if I get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in the future.

The poet Olav Hauge “died in the old way”

In his newsletter Ordinary Plots, writer and teacher Devin Kelly shares poems with thoughts on those poems. This morning, his weekly article analyzed the poem It’s Cold in Big Houses by Norwegian poet Olav Hauge. The poem itself is quite beautiful, evoking fall when it begins to snow and turn cold, and describing loneliness, “huge and barren and leaky under the roof.”

I’m interested especially in the short biography of Hauge’s life by Robert Bly that Kelly includes in the article, which has these lines:

He died in the old way; no real evidence of disease was present. He simply did not eat for ten days, and so he died.

Now we call this VSED — voluntarily stopping eating and drinking — and it is not “the old way” but something some people take up when they are done with life but life is not done with them yet. It seems almost like a new way these days. I only heard of it recently and I don’t think it’s something the older members of my family knew about. My stepfather George wanted to end his life after he moved into assisted living. Still with his wits about him, he had lost vision, mobility, and couldn’t care for himself. He had to live apart from my mother, who could no longer care for him. I wonder had he known about VSED, is it something he would have wanted to pursue?

Choosing a planned passing

Choosing death is on my mind this weekend because I’ve just finished the book Fight to the Death: The Human Stories Shaping America’s MAID Debate by Paul Brand. I’m interested in how people can manage their passing away instead of passively waiting for death to come to them.

I learned so much from the book, and it made me more aware of the harder questions in medical assistance in dying, and in voluntarily choosing death: what about for mental illness? for disability? for young people? for people who don’t have terminal disease? people with dementia?

I’m particularly interested in the question of advance directives for people who are beginning to become demented. Can the advance directives actually be enforced? Brand told the story of one woman who had an advance directive indicating she wanted to be euthanized once she had lost certain functioning. But when the time came, she no longer understood what was going on, and fought the injection of life-ending drugs.

In Colorado, to qualify for medical aid-in-dying medication, you must be a Colorado resident at least 18 years out, have a terminal illness with a prognosis of six months or less to live, possess the mental capacity to make your own health care decisions, and be capable of self-administering and ingesting medication. If you are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, this isn’t going to help you, because by the time you have six months to live (difficult anyway to gauge with Alzheimer’s) you won’t have the capacity to make your own decisions or administer the medication.

So what are the alternatives? I judge that I have an 80% chance of seeing dementia at the end of my life versus being taken out by something else like cancer, which is more suited to addressing with MAID, once one reaches a near-terminal state.

Choosing VSED would have to happen before I had lost much of my cognitive capacity. But I think I’m ok with that, of course depending on the exact situation. Alternatively, I could put in my advance directive that once I had lost certain functions (e.g., once I couldn’t feed myself), ask that I not be fed or given anything to drink. This would likely require that I not be in institutional care and that I have one of my children guide the process and deal with the guilt of withholding comfort from me when I didn’t understand what was going on.

Ultimately, to me, that seems untenable. So I would probably choose to exit earlier, with a potential loss of some good life, instead of later.

Ideally I’ll be like both of my grandmothers, one of whom had dementia only in the last couple years of her life, and passed away after a fall that broke her hip, and the other of whom who maintained cognitive function until the end, and then died in her sleep.

However, if I instead follow the pathways of my two aunts, one of which started to decline in her late sixties and died in her early seventies of dementia, the other of whom started to decline in her seventies, and died in her early eighties after years of institutional care, I will need to take action early. This is sometimes known as pre-emptive VSED, as described in this article about VSED advance directives.

Having a choice

What matters the most is not what I end up doing, should I start to lose cognitive function, but rather knowing that I have choices and I have some level of control in being able to avoid a long period of memory care where I don’t know what’s going on and I can’t care for myself.

When people have terminal diagnoses, the option of being able to choose when to end their life can make them feel more optimistic. In Fight to the Death, Brand shares the story of Jeremy Boal, diagnosed with ALS at age 56 which forced him to retire from his work as a physician. Brand quotes Boal on assisted dying:

When I got my diagnosis, I went into a profound depression…. I was just racked with grief and fear and dread, and it took me a while to get my head screwed back on and accept it. By far the biggest reason why I was able to move back to the sunny side of the street was because I knew I could access assisted dying. I didn’t have to worry that this would get out of control, that I would be locked in at the mercy of this disease. I could eventually decide that my suffering was enough.

Those who confront dementia do not have the luxury of eventually deciding their suffering is enough. They must choose ahead of time, not knowing how soon they will lose function or how many days or months or years of good life they are giving up by preemptively saying goodbye.

When to choose pre-emptive VSED?

The Global Deterioration Scale, designed primarily for characterizing Alzheimer’s disease progression, uses seven distinct stages from no cognitive decline to very severe cognitive decline. You would need to choose VSED before becoming so forgetful and unable to do complex tasks that you couldn’t remember you were doing it, or manage the discomfort and refusal involved. This is around Stage 3 of the seven stage model: mild cognitive decline, which can last two to four years.

Beyond that, you can live three to eight more years, if you have Alzheimer’s, and some people can survive up to ten or more years, especially with good care (making good care something paradoxically questionable). Those with vascular dementia or Lewy body dementia may not live as long. The older you are, the more compressed the timeline tends to be. And women tend to live roughly 20% longer with the disease than men.

There are emerging treatments for Alzheimer’s, but so far none provides a cure. Perhaps by the time I face dementia — if I face dementia — the treatments will be more effective.

Planning for the week ahead

Last week I welcomed a new foster dog, Paige. This week she’ll need to go to the vet to get spayed, and will come home in a cone. She’s such a sweet and smart dog. I know she’ll get adopted quickly.

Other than that, it’s just the usual: dog walking, swimming laps and doing cardio machines at the gym, managing my flow allocation and options trading activities, hanging out with family and friends.

Having enjoyed the Olav Hauge poem so much, and more generally Devin Kelly’s discussion of poetry, I wonder if I might like to write some myself?